Thursday, October 20, 2016

A cunning Scottish lady
bests an English baron of legendary control in a game of business and
seduction…

Yes that is what our special guest today writes, her most recent being Wicked Rivals that was released October 17th, 2016. Today she's here telling us about how she listens to the voices in her head.

Whenever I’m a reader event one of the
most common questions I get asked is “How do you get your ideas?” I think
that’s one of the toughest questions to answer. But truthfully it’s not so much
where ideas come from but where characters come from that matters when I start
writing a book.

I almost always see a character in my
head, forming so strongly that I can’t get them out. And I see that character
in a scene acting a certain way and it just grows from there and the plot sorts
it’s self out as the character begin to talk to me. So how does this work
exactly when it comes to characters in a real book?

Well let’s see, when I first wrote
Wicked Designs, the first book in the League of Rogues series, all of the six
hunky gorgeous and totally bad boy English lords came to me fully developed.
Ashton, the hero of Wicked Rivals, the fourth book, emerged as this tall,
blond-haired man with refined tastes and in total control of himself. I knew
immediately that this man had a unique story to tell. His desires, his lusts,
his primal urges, especially in the bedroom had been carefully controlled and
buried. I knew then that it was going to take one heck of a woman to make him
lose that control.

Rosalind, the heroine of Wicked Rivals
showed up most unexpectedly in the second book in the series called His Wicked
Seduction. I had started to write a side scene where Ashton, having just been
shot in the arm a week before, is sitting at his study, hating that he can’t
accomplish any work without some degree of pain from his wound. This was one of
those times where I really let the characters spin their story and let me
glimpse their world. One minute Ashton is at his desk, and the next his butler
is informing him that he has a visitor, an owner from a rival shipping company
that he has been competing with in business. His intent is to buy the man from
this other company out and remove the competition. What he doesn’t expect is to
come face to face with a dark-haired Scottish beauty with a fiery temper. As it
turns out, Rosalind shocked both Ashton and me when she let us know she was a
widow of the man who owed the company Ashton wants to stop competing with. In
other words, this is what it means when characters talk, and the way I listen
back is to let them tell me their stories.

Wicked Rivals was truly a story driven
by characters who wanted to tell me and the readers about their lives. Between
the fiery Rosalind with her guarded heart and the cool, collected, masterful
Ashton there was a love story full of sparks, desire and untamable passions,
but also of true, fragile trust and intimacy that was built with long nights of
Ashton and Rosalind holding each other and whispering of their dreams and
secret longings. It’s a story of redemption and love that outlasts time and I’m
so grateful to be an author whose characters love to talk to me.

Lauren Smith is back with the latest in her sexy
#historicalromance series, League of
Rogues, with WICKED RIVALS!

Merciless
and powerful, Ashton Lennox is a wealthy man because he puts business before
everything else, especially love. As a member of the infamous League of Rogues,
he’s no stranger to scandal. His bedroom conquests are as legendary as his
fortune. As he searches for a way to bring down an old enemy bent on destroying
the lives of his friends, the last thing he needs is a Scottish widow getting
in his way.

A FIERY
WOMAN WHO WON’T BACK DOWN…

The daughter of a Scottish lord with a dark and treacherous past, Rosalind
Melbourne has spent years distancing from her past. After escaping her
tyrannical father and marrying an aging English lord, she has become a powerful
widow with a business empire at her command. Her business dealings are
everything to her, leaving her no time for love. Especially not with her
business rival Ashton, a man with a scandalous reputation as striking as his
blue eyes.

A GAME OF WITS TURNS TO A GAME OF SEDUCTION…

Ashton is fascinated by the strong-willed, intelligent and sensual lady who, up
until now, had outsmarted him at every turn. Rosalind wishes she could deny she
is falling for the brooding, handsome baron. How can she possibly trust him
when doing so could cost her what she values most—her freedom? When Ashton
discovers Rosalind might hold the key to saving the League of Rogues, he knows
he will do anything to woo his wicked lass. As their pasts return to haunt them
and dark forces rise to keep them from exposing a deadly spymaster, their game
of love turns to a game of survival…

Warning: This book includes a
brooding baron who’s wild in bed, a crafty Scottish lass who never knows when
to quit, a wicked game of strip chess, and a merry band of rogues whose first
instinct is to run they hear wedding bells ring.

Amazon Best-Selling Author
Lauren Smith is an attorney by day, author by night, who pens adventurous and
edgy romance stories by the light of her smart phone flashlight app. She’s a
native Oklahoman who lives with her three pets: a feisty chinchilla,
sophisticated cat and dapper little schnauzer. She’s won multiple awards in
several romance sub-genres including being an Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel
Award Quarter-Finalist and a Semi-Finalist for the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Award.

DISCLAIMER

The reviews and opinions expressed here on CUDDLES PLEASE Book Blog are strictly my own. I do not get paid to review books. If we receive an Advance Review Copy (ARC) from an author, publisher and/or publicist, the review will indicate such. All other eBooks are purchased at my own expense unless indicated otherwise.